Fugsnarf's Guild

For lack of a specific title due to there being so much to talk about in this post, I'm just calling this post the Fugsnarf Report. Catchy, isn't it? We'll see if it sticks.

Anyways, I got back from Africa recently. That was truly a great trip. We treated almost 2,000 people as a whole in the 5 days we were there treating. We went to a town clinic, then we went to a more rural clinic (believe it or not, the rural clinic building was way better than the town's. It was clean and it had fans. It even had cold water.), and lastly we went to a prison. The prison was certainly the most humbling of the experiences I had there. They really have it bad. The US prisons are freaken 5-star hotels compared to that. It's rough. Anyways, great experience overall. I would certainly do it again and I would suggest it to anybody.

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Well, as you can see here, I changed my CSS layout up a bit. I thought that space background looked pretty neat, so I put that in the back and made it not scroll. Comment on it if you want. I'd like to know if you guys want the boxes on the sides as well as the comment boxes to be transparent like that. The only thing that really gets in the way of the text is the lighter part of the planet there, but it doesn't bother me much. Does it bother you?

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Zelda: Shadow of the Triforce was going along so nicely, and it still is. The only issue is that... well... ever since the new BYOND versions came out (455+) the left side of the screen is acting very weird.
The game is also running EXTREMELY slowly. None of this happened until the new BYOND version. Very strange and actually unexplainable. What's even weirder is that the map looks fine, but it's only at runtime that it appears to screw up like that. I haven't put much time into trying to fix it.

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I've updated my demo, Conquer Multitiling! Since multitiling is almost (ALMOST) a thing of the past, I made a new section for the newbs that can't figure out how to make multitiling work for the large icons since the density is in the bottom-left.

It's still a rather simple demo, but probably useful to somebody. I kept in the old school multitiling section due to the fact that anything bigger than 8x8 tiles needs to be multitiled past those 8 tiles. I don't know how often that would be the case. Probably not at all.

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Now for the best part, my new 'project'!

Some of you might remember my old Megaman game, Megaman Files. Bottom line, it sucked, for many reasons.

1. There were many bugs.
2. There was nothing to do.
3. It was poorly programmed.
4. The controls were terrible.

The list goes on. I'm trying to right these wrongs in a new Megaman Files that I've been working on religiously lately. I'll go into some details on what I'm planning.

First off, I'm planning on getting all of the main playable characters in before I publically release it (if not all, most). These characters will all be balanced and each have their own usefulness.



From left to right:
Megaman, Bass, Protoman, Quint, Enker, Ballade, and Punk.

All of these are done in the style of Megaman: Wily Wars. I did Quint and Punk myself :). I even had to make Punk's running poses.


What's going to make the controls of this game so much better is that I've made movement into a loop. This allows for not only smoother movement, but also the ability to both shoot and jump while you're running and have it not interfere with your running. In the case of most other platformers on BYOND, it interferes with the running because the movement isn't a loop.

I've done a lot in the game already and it's coming along very nicely. I hope to consistantly update you guys on the progress of both this and Zelda: Shadow of the Triforce as I continue development on both of them. Here's some screenshots of what I have for Megaman Files:

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That's all I have for today. Until next time!

Well tomorrow I'll be up bright and early to get ready to fly to Kenya. I'll be going there to take part in a humanitarian/mission trip with my parents and many other doctors from this organization we're going with.

I'm quite excited about this trip. Any of you that know me personally probably know that I am deeply religious. This is a great opportunity for that reason and also because I love helping my dad out.

My dad is an Oral Surgeon, so he'll be doing a lot of tooth extractions. That is usually his main focus on these trips. Who knows, maybe he'll let me pull a tooth or two with a little bit of his help. I remember he did in 8th grade on another trip.

The people we treat on these trips are always so kind and happy. They never get treatment like this! Anything is good enough for them. We care enough to do the best job we possibly can.

My other mission trips have taken me to Panama, Guatemala, Mexico, and New Guinea for the work we did. These trips really are incredible experiences. If you ever get a chance to go on one, take it!

Anyways, wish me a good trip. I'll be gone until the Monday after the up-coming Monday. I'll see you all later!

You may remember me talking about the mini-bosses that I was planning to make in the first dungeon of Zelda: Shadow of the Triforce. I've finished those and also increased the dungeon size a lot from there. Here are some screenshots of my fight with the two mini armoses.



Hmmm... The room looks pretty normal. Those statues look weird though.



Oh, crap, the doors closed. Clearly there is a fight ahead of me.





When you kill both of them, you receive a heart piece.

The Armos have 6 health each. Your wimpy sword and arrows to one damage do them for each hit. What makes this fight fairly easy is that when they lock on to you if you are directly behind/ahead/to the side of them, they charge at you. If you just sit there, you'll die pretty fast. The nice thing is that you get an easy target for both your arrows and even to throw pots at. I advise not using the sword though.

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On to my Build a Space Game project. I'm pretty excited about this, so I figured I'd tell everyone what I have planned.

My team consists of three people. There's me doing all the programming, Korby doing the sprite work, and a friend of mine, Aaron, doing music.

In this game, you are a member of Earth's elite defence force that tries to keep the galaxy safe from evil people (there have to be evil people, right?) This game is based on the theme of Asteroids. There is this evil organization called RockStar that is so incredibly evil that they spawn asteroid fields in stupid places to destroy planets and whatnot. You need to go through these asteroid fields and destroy the main machine in the middle which will get rid of the asteroids.

The nice thing about this game is that it's psuedo 3D. It's a lot like StarFox. Now before you go off saying that I will fail at this, keep in mind that I've been looking into and fooling around with the whole 3D concept for awhile now. Eventually it hit me. Why not make something with this for the BASG competition? So I got this group together and got started.

I decided to provide for everyone a little screenshot of some of the testing. It shows the ship sprite I'll be using (Korby'll probably be making new asteroids) and it shows how the asteroids get bigger as they get closer to you. Don't let them hit you!



That's all I have for today! I'll try not to let working on the BASG game get too much in the way of at least updating Zelda a bit.

So lately I've been fooling around a bit with some different concepts, trying to expand my knowledge and just have some fun fooling around with something of a little less importance. I started with the idea of making a game with a fully rotatable view, more isometric than 3D. I then remember Gakumerasara's Vengeance 56 game. Though I cannot even come close to making anything like it, I've been toying around with the concept.

I came up with the obvious idea of simply locating and projecting your surroundings as a HUD display on your screen. The proc will look for the various turfs or objects around you and decide what to show you on your side of the screen. With this concept, I created a very crude little demo in which you can walk north and south along side of a wall until you hit a wall in front of you. It's not meant to be pretty, people!



Please excuse if the gif goes off of the screen to the side. The proc also only displays things up to 8 tiles ahead of you. That's why the wall looks like it's kind of appearing out of nowhere. You can comment on it if you like.

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On to Zelda updates.

I made some pots now! These pots can be picked up and thrown at enemies to deal damage. Some of the pots also hold little things inside of them such as hearts or arrows. The arrows in the pots are necessary for certain things such at hitting switches from a distance to open a door.








Now besides the pots I am also expanding the dungeon a lot and working on the mini-boss!

At first I wasn't planning on having a mini-boss, but I decided to make one just for the fun of it. It's going to be two statues sitting in the room. You enter the room, then you watch the statues come alive. You then need to fight them. They're difficult to hit with your sword though! You need to use your arrows or even the various pots lieing around to attack them easily.

Sorry for having so few screenshots as I usually do. I'll have plenty more next time! I'm still working hard and going strong.

Finally! The first gameplay video of Zelda: Shadow of the Triforce is here for all to see! I would like to thank my good friend ProtoZX for making this video as his computer is far better qualified.

One thing about the video, some of the sound is a little bit off. You might hear some sound effects before they are actually suppose to be heard. It's not that big of a deal.

I have no idea how to make the video appear on my post. I've tried copying that code but it never works properly. For now, you'll have to deal with this.

Of course, that is only the first cutscene. I also have some basic gameplay of the begining for you all to see! Credit to ProtoZX once again for making this video.
(Some of the mids in the end of this video don't appear to work for ProtoZX, so you can't hear them as they're supposed to be heard. I'm working on resolving that issue. Also I'd like to apologize for some of the weird noises you hear in the cutscene with Impa and I think one other time in this video.)

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the videos!


As far as recent updates go, I can't say that much has been done. I'm basically working on the last half of the dungeon where you work to get the master key to face the boss. I'm also working on adding pots to pick up and throw.